


Time on His Side

by bellatemple



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Episode Related, Episode: s04e12 And the Echoes of Memory, F/M, Gen, Humor, Time Travel, also all of season four, and there's a brief fling in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, everyone else makes a cameo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 15:44:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13616514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: Set after the events of the season four finale. Flynn REALLY should have thought that plan through a little longer.





	Time on His Side

**Author's Note:**

> Because what is the point of doing all that character development if it doesn't STICK? (Seriously, first Ezekiel and now the whole crew. Come one, Librarians!)

"Alright," Eve said, settling into her lounge chair and raising her fruity cocktail in a small toast. "Jenkins is distracting Nick and the elves —"

"Still not calling him Santa?" Flynn asked. 

" _Still_ not calling him Santa," Eve confirmed. "Which means you and I officially have the cabana to ourselves." 

"Yesssss, I like the way you think!" Flynn rolled off his lounger to join Eve on hers. 

"So it's time to get down to business." 

"Business?" Flynn stopped midway through climbing onto her chair. "Nononononono. There is no doing of business on our tether-moon!" 

"Not calling it that, either," Eve said. She grabbed Flynn by the lips (their thing! She remembered!) and turned his head aside. "We _need_ to get down to business, because there were some very successful artifact retrievals between Nicole getting loose and her attempting to break the Library, and we need to make sure they still happen." 

Flynn sighed and sat back down on his lounger. "Right. There's that Fortuna statue." 

"Who isn't even a statue right now. We'll have to re-do draining her luck to stop her from draining the world." 

"And James Desmond Wheeler's typewriter. That one will be fun to do all over again." 

Eve smiled. "I really think it will." She sipped her drink. "Should we tell the others how that worked, or just let them figure it out again?" 

"We should probably tell them as little as possible," Flynn mused. "We've already mucked around with the timeline a lot by telling Nicole about her future and tethering early. We don't want to change too much. . . ." 

"Then Jenkins might not make his D&D friends," Eve agreed. 

"Yes, exactly! It would be terrible if Jenkins couldn't make his hang on I'm sorry did you say _D &D_ friends?" 

"I'd tell you the details, Librarian," Eve said. "But that might alter the timeline." 

Flynn harrumphed and sat back down again. "Right. We'll just have to be careful to keep as much the same as possible. It'll be easy." 

"Totally easy," Eve agreed.

*

It wasn't.

*

" _Okay_ , but I really feel like we shouldn't have overlooked the artifact that could have _stopped the destruction of the entire ecosystem._ " Flynn propped his hands on his hips, looking out over the desolate wasteland that had once been Portland. Every tree in the world had suddenly died at once just a few short weeks ago, but mankind had already devolved into several small clans of bloodthirsty survivors. Only the immortals remained unaffected.

This was not how he'd pictured his eternity with the Library. 

"To be fair," Eve said, pressing her hands to her forehead. "We got the Zero Seed _right after_ I thought you'd quit the Library forever. It's not really something I like to think about much." 

" _Not thinking about it ended the world!_ " 

"Excuse me," Jenkins said, sounding somehow even more irate than Flynn had ever heard before. "Do I take it that you two have _done_ this before?" 

Eve and Flynn shared a glance. Flynn reminded himself that it was not the time to think about how Eve managed to look beautiful even artfully singed and dressed to do battle for water rights. 

"Not — _exactly_ this?" Eve said sheepishly. 

Jenkins gave a weary sigh. "What did you two do?" 

"In our defense," Flynn said. "You were dead."

"With all due respect, sir," Jenkins said, both hands in fists by the sides of his face. "If you do not find a way to fix this, I will find a way to make both of _you_ dead." 

Eve and Flynn shared another glance. Flynn wondered if Eve appreciated the artistry of his boutonniere made of shredded tire. 

"Toaster?" Eve asked. 

"Toaster," Flynn agreed.

*

"Wait, hang on." Stone looked between Eve and Flynn. Flynn gave him a hopeful smile. "You want me to go get turned into a _what?_ "

"Not 'turned into'," Flynn said. "More sort of temporarily. . . ." He waved both hands in a circle and looked to Eve for help. 

"Absorbed?" she offered. 

"Absorbed," Flynn agreed. "Temporarily." 

"By a _tree_ ," said Stone. 

"Yes!" Flynn opened his arms wide. "See? He gets it." 

" _Why?_ " 

"Because," Eve said. "If you don't go speak for the tree, DOSA is going to cut it down trying to stop it from —" 

"Absorbing," said Flynn. 

"— Absorbing anyone who wanders by." 

"The trees need an ambassador," Flynn said. "Being an ambassador is an honor!" 

Stone didn't look convinced. "Then you do it!" 

"Flynn can't do it," Eve said. "He doesn't speak 64 dialects." 

"Only 32," said Flynn. 

"So you're the one the trees need," said Eve. 

"How do you two even know about this?!" Stone asked. 

Eve and Flynn shared a glance. Flynn shelved the mental image of Eve wearing only strategically-placed leaves for a more appropriate time. Like when Stone wasn't standing three feet away. 

"You're just going to have to trust us," said Eve. 

Stone crossed his arms over his chest and looked uncomfortable.

*

"There has to have been a better way to do this other than drugging Stone and leaving him in the Devil's Forest," Eve said, cradling the Zero Seed close to her chest.

"And risk the accelerated heat death of the entire planet?" Flynn scoffed. He ignored the dirty look tree!Stone was giving him and examined the Grandfather Tree. "So . . . how'd you all get him back out, last time?"

*

"Okay." Flynn sagged onto his bed. "So the good news is the world isn't going to end, and Cassandra still decided to check out the town with the epic safety record on her own, so the fairy still got set free on schedule."

"Because she was so upset over Stone still being a tree," Eve pointed out. 

"He _chose_ to stay there!" 

"After you drugged him." 

" _Heat death of the entire planet._ " 

"And now Cassandra wants to stay in Ohio with the woman she met there, and we still need to stop the Civil War ghosts from massacring an entire town. But we can't, because without Stone or Cassandra, there's no one for the other brother to possess that we know wouldn't just shoot Ezekiel —" 

"I would _never_ shoot Ezekiel." 

"— And that Ezekiel wouldn't shoot without even _being_ possessed, because you drove his friends away." 

Flynn sighed. "It is quite a pickle. Also, have you noticed Jenkins has been acting strange? He called me 'mi hermano' earlier. He didn't even get the accent right." 

"Oh god, Jeff." Eve sat down next to Flynn, head in her hands. "I completely forgot about Jeff." She looked up sharply. "And Asmodeus!" 

"We definitely don't need to worry about Asmodeus," Flynn scoffed. "Merlin trapped him in a book ages ago."

*

Flynn picked a cobweb out of his teeth and looked at the mess Jeff had made of the Library. "Right," he said, and when he shared a glance with Eve he barely even admired how her hair framed her face when it was all in disarray like that. They'd really screwed this timeline up. "Toaster?"

" _Toaster_ ," said Eve.

*

"Okay," Flynn said. It was their . . . eleventh? Fifteenth? Time through. Ezekiel was in Gamblers Anonymous after Eve had forgotten to include him in the plan to break Fortuna's luck curse, Cassandra had been dragged into the past by Ambrose Gethic thanks to Flynn trying to get creative saving his personal hero, and with the two of them gone, Stone had ditched out of being human in order to stay a tree. _Again_. "I think I've got it."

"No more," Eve begged. "Flynn, please. I've had to lose them too many times already. And the world's ended six different ways! I hate to say it, but —" 

"Don't —" 

"— Maybe we need to —"

"The Library needs _all_ of us, Eve, we've proved that! More than once!" 

"— Cut our losses." Eve sagged. "Maybe — maybe we're not meant to get to keep everyone. Maybe we have to choose between Jenkins and the Library and — all our friends." 

Eve and Flynn shared a glance. Flynn realized how much Eve had aged since that long ago tether-moon. Her blonde hair was going silver, and she didn't hold herself as tall as she used to. 

"We're immortal now, Flynn. That means we'll _have_ to say goodbye to them eventually. No matter what we do, sooner or later, Cassandra and Ezekiel and Stone are going to die on us. Maybe it's better this way. If they all just . . . leave instead." 

"Oh Eve." Flynn gently pressed his hands to her cheeks. "You're their Guardian, Eve. You can't give up on them." 

"I'm _your_ Guardian, Flynn." 

"No." Flynn shook his head. "You're my partner. Forever. And I wouldn't have that any other way. But you've always been _their_ Guardian." 

Eve shook her head, tears in her beautiful blue eyes. "I don't think I can be, Flynn. I don't think I can take it." 

Flynn pulled her into a gentle kiss, wiping her tears away with his thumbs. "Shhh. Alright. It's okay. I won't make you do it again." 

She wrapped her arms around him and sobbed into his chest. Once she'd cried herself to sleep (they didn't need sleep anymore, but it was still healing, and anyway, mortal habits die hard), he slipped out of bed and went to find the Toaster of Albuquerque.

*

"I've done a lot of strange things over the last 500 years," Nicole said. "But helping a Librarian fake his own kidnapping is a new one." She tilted her head at her enchanted mirror, where she and Flynn watched Eve read Flynn's "resignation". "I've done it for a few princesses and once for a Hollywood starlet, but not a Librarian."

"Shhhh," Flynn hissed. In the mirror, Eve was gathering the others, her face solemn and determined. "I want to hear this." 

"Flynn's — gone," Stone said, shock written plain on his face. "Just like that?" 

"But he can't quit," Cassandra protested. "He's tethered to the Library!" 

"So was Charlene," Ezekiel said. "And she ran around having adventures for a year." 

"So wait." Cassandra frowned into the air, clearly twitching to release her gift even though the problem was only tangentially math-related. "Darington Dare said there _has_ to be only one Librarian. But Judson was a Librarian and he was around for centuries. Including while Dare was here." 

"So, what?" Stone asked. "Flynn's on vacation while we have to decide which of us gets to be 'the one'? Who does that?" 

"Seriously," Ezekiel said. "I mean, it's not like it's a hard choice. Obviously the one true Librarian is me." 

The three fell into bickering until Eve barked out an order. The clippings book had given them a case at a team building camp, and they were going to solve it, dammit, and learn how to be a proper team again!

Flynn kept watching as his fellow Librarians left to go pack, still arguing over who got to be the "true Librarian". The answer was all of them, of course. He'd known all along that Dare was wrong. But it was crucial that they each figure that out again for themselves. He watched as Eve carefully folded the note he'd asked Nicole to forge, to keep this timeline as close to the original one as possible. He watched Eve look around the office, then press her hand to the magic mirror. 

"Thank you," she whispered. Flynn matched his hand to hers, but didn't let himself be seen. He'd had several lifetimes now to perfect that trick. In his mind's eye, though, he imagined them sharing a glance. 

"This time we're not losing anyone," he said. "I promise."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Рядом с ним](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13630566) by [MedWolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MedWolf/pseuds/MedWolf)




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